and everything seems a bit brighter then it should be
by FallingNarwhals
Summary: He's used to having the sky on his back, open desert with sweat dripping down his neck as he studies the strange ruins of the underground caves of northern Pangrea. He hates these enclosed spaces, these cold metal walls, these lights that hum constantly. A rhythm is pounded into his skull that falls into tune with his heartbeat, his intake of his breath, and his hollow steps.


**i just,,,rly like worldbuilding ok**

 **who is ready for voltron season 2 to come out on jan. 20 bc boi howdy am I**

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The Castle had no windows and that makes Keith want to scream.

He's used to having the sky on his back, open desert with sweat dripping down his neck as he studies the strange ruins of the underground caves of northern Pangrea. He hates these enclosed spaces, these cold metal walls, these lights that hum constantly. A rhythm is pounded into his skull that falls into tune with his heartbeat, his intake of his breath, and his hollow steps that swiftly pad across the Castle.

He hates the gravity. He'd been to the Moon once on a class trip and he could barely walk. Now, with the gravity set to a higher level than Keith was used to, made him drag his feet and he noticed when he didn't leap as high as he should have, or when Lance threw the salt shaker in his direction and it landed four feet away from him, scattering white grains over the table.

He once had a friend at the garrison that was from New Houston, the city on Mars. It took months of unlearning the gravity of his home planet, and the kid would trip down stairs and couldn't lift anything more than sixty pounds for weeks. He always brushed it off as something that would never happen to him, never realizing that all the planets and moons had different gravity that would pull on his joints or cut the cords.

It was not wired in Keith's brain to walk among aliens like he was one of them, not wired to handle being away from something familiar for so long, not ready for his goddamned brain to handle flying thousands of light years a tick without so much a stress toy.

He'd taken to chewing on his collar and and picking at his eyebrows and any other forms of stimming that probably aren't healthy but make him feel better so why not?

When he found Hunk had a pen that you could click over and over, he asked to borrow it and never gave it back. It burned a hole in his pocket, but it was probably safer than picking his eyebrows apart.

he remembered once, maybe when he was eight or so, his teacher assigned them to take care of a plant over a year. The cacti, the one plant that hadn't been genetically modified or wiped to extinction, was their assignment. You had to water your cacti two drops of water every Monday, or otherwise it will get overwatered.

Keith loved his catus. He named it Fredrick (not that he would admit it to anyone) and made sure he was always in direct sunlight. He loved that cacti so much, that he once gave it three drops of water instead of two. then four. then five.

when he woke up Tuesday morning, the cacti had imploded on itself, having collected too much water that it died.

Too much of a good thing could kill you.

And not enough of anything, regardless of good or bad, didn't do shit to anyone.

Shiro once, maybe when he was still a kid and Shiro was the teenage older brother that gave you car rides around town, cut his hair.

Their dad was getting lazy at properly taking care of his two sons, much less noticing that Keith's hair went past his shoulders. It curled at the end, getting so knotted that Shiro had to cut it off.

He and Matt, one of Shiro's friends from school (but Keith noticed the way they looked at each other) had put an old towel around his shoulders and snipped the hair to just above his collarbone, riding his hair of knots and curls. He'd felt so much lighter that day, and even was able to go into a store without panicking.

His dad didn't even notice, didn't even care for his sons. As long as they didn't change the channel or burn the house down, his dad didn't care.

Shiro was more of a fatherly figure then their biological dad ever was. He was the one that sat with Keith through panic attacks, patted him on the back when he tried his hardest on a test but still scored in the 84th percentile, bought him stim toys and understood when he got overwhelmed in social situations.

He never took him to a doctor, because he was always healthy. Never took him to a therapist because that cost money they didn't have, but instead took courses online and did his best to help him. Helped him get up on the days when he could barely lift his head, understood if he had to miss a day of school, always put Keith before himself.

And in return Keith became the best possible pilot at the garrison, because in the air you don't have to worry about social interactions or people staring at him or anything. He was thrown an obstacle and he could dodge it, given a problem and he could fix it.

Then his older brother told him of a mission that was everything Shiro had dreamed of, and more.

"Kerberos, Keith! We'll be making history. And Matt will be going too."

Keith had noticed the faint pink blush that dusted Shiro's nose when he mentioned Matt, and smiled that real smile he only felt in the simulators. "You should go. You'll never get an opportunity like this again."

So Shiro was launched into space from the planet Mars, a few klicks away from New Houston, on November fifth (the thirty first sol of the eighth month in Martian time).

Eight earth months passed. And Shiro was dead.

Two weeks after that Keith left the garrison and everything Shiro helped him work for and only looked back once.

It was nice to have a crew that trusted him, even if one spoke broken Russian and slipped into English when he was distracted. But he was a good engineer, once fixed a old fighter jet from the Martian Wars and flew it under the garrison's watchful eye. The other was a New Houston native that talked with a mix of Martian and English slang and favored old disney movies with strong subplots.

He liked having a place where he didn't have to fit in because no one else was like everyone else; everyone had their own quirks and slang and awful Russian.

And maybe he did have a place of belonging now, billions of light years from Earth and Mars and New Houston and the Pangrea ruins. Maybe he did have a place with his one-armed older brother, a person who gave the best of hugs, someone hell-bent on finding their family who might even be his sibling-in-law one day, a boy with eyes that matched the Earth skies, a space princess and her uncle.

Maybe an autistic swordsman with a mullet that rode the Red Lion into battle had a place in the universe after all.


End file.
